Saturday, March 11, 2017

Super-statistician Nate Silver has done an extensive
analysis of the burning journalistic question of our time: How did the media
miss the Trump story? How did the media not see that Trump could win?

And yet, complacency sometimes has a cost. Sometimes
groupthink blinds you to the facts. The media assurance of an inevitable
Hillary victory seems to have contributed to the Hillary loss. Apparently, the leftist media
persuaded the Clinton campaign that it could not lose. The Clinton campaign acted
as though this were true. To their and to the media’s chagrin.

Silver does not mention the following point, so I will. The
media is not just suffering from groupthink, but they live in a Hegelian world
where the movement of the World Spirit inevitably produces the outcomes that it
wishes. The groupthinkers did not just believe that they were right. They believed
that they were riding the wave of history and that nothing could go wrong. They
took it on faith, not on fact.

Their motto: never let a fact disturb your beliefs. They did
not need to know what was going on in Wisconsin or even Pennsylvania because
the outcome was predetermined. Hegel had taught them that they could not lose.
Now, they rail hysterically when Trump plays loose with the facts. They would
do better to ask whether Trump became president because they themselves bought
into a belief system that was impervious to fact.

Silver suggests that journalists are living in a bubble. No
one has doubted that mainstream journalists reject diversity of opinion. They have been steeped in the dogmas of critical theory and deconstruction. They
have learned that communication is about propaganda, not information. They provide enough facts to make their
theories plausible and ignore the rest.

Now, a few words from Nate Silver.

First, the New York Times was convinced that Hillary could
not lose:

Much of
The New York Times’s coverage, for instance, implied that Clinton’s odds were
close to 100 percent. In an article on Oct.
17 — more than three weeks before Election Day — they portrayed the
race as being effectively over, the only question being whether Clinton should
seek a landslide or instead assist down-ballot Democrats…

One must note, because Silver himself is too nice to say so,
but anyone who offers a deviant opinion is quickly shunned by the
group. His or her career prospects will quickly go down in flames. The same
applies in the American university system. It is not an accident that
everything thinks the same thoughts:

… political
experts4 aren’t
a very diverse group and tend to place a lot of faith in the opinions of other
experts and other members of the political establishment. Once a consensus view
is established, it tends
to reinforce itself until and unless there’s very compelling evidence
for the contrary position. Social media, especially Twitter, can amplify the
groupthink further. It can be an echo chamber.

And also:

The
political diversity of journalists is not very strong, either. As of 2013, only 7
percent of them identified as Republicans (although only 28 percent
called themselves Democrats with the majority saying they were independents).
And although it’s not a perfect approximation — in most newsrooms, the people
who issue endorsements are not the same as the ones who do reporting — there’s
reason to think that the industry was particularly out of sync with Trump.

He continues:

But
since at least the days of “The
Boys on the Bus,” political journalism has suffered from a pack mentality.
Events such as conventions and debates literally gather thousands of
journalists together in the same room; attend one of these events, and you can
almost smell the conventional wisdom being manufactured in real time.

Silver points out that the mainstream media
is now garnering an increasingly large share of everyone’s attention. Fewer
people are reading blogs and more people are reading the major outlets:

The
share of total exposure8 for
the top five news sources9 climbed
from roughly 25 percent a decade ago to around 35 percent last year, and has
spiked to above 40 percent so far in 2017. While not a perfect measure10,
this is one sign the digital age hasn’t necessarily democratized the news
media. Instead, the most notable difference in Memeorandum sources between 2007 and 2017 is the decline of
independent blogs; many of the most popular ones from the late ’aughts either
folded or (like FiveThirtyEight) were bought by larger news organizations.
Thus, blogs and local newspapers — two of the better checks on Northeast
Corridor conventional wisdom run amok — have both had less of a say in the
conversation.

Silver recommends that journalists go back to doing
journalism. But, given what they learned in college, can they easily allow the
facts, not their opinions, to drive their reporting?A
bad habit is difficult to break.

In his words:

Journalists
should recalibrate themselves to be more skeptical of the consensus of their
peers. That’s because a position that seems to have deep backing from the
evidence may really just be a reflection from the echo chamber. You should be
looking toward how much evidence
there is for a particular position as opposed to how many people hold that position: Having 20 independent
pieces of evidence that mostly point in the same direction might indeed reflect
a powerful consensus, while having 20 like-minded people citing the same warmed-over evidence is
much less powerful. Obviously this can be taken too far and in most fields,
it’s foolish (and annoying) to constantly doubt the market or consensus view.
But in a case like politics where the conventional wisdom can congeal so
quickly — and yet has so often been wrong — a certain amount of contrarianism
can go a long way.

4 comments:

This sort of analysis does get to be a bit over the top. It is true that Trump wasn't the media's candidate for winning, but he was the media's candidate to mock, but also to give vast free publicity.

The reality is if city folks lived in our own bubble we would all conclude Trump was a fringe celebrity candidate who was selling his own brand and wasn't interested in winning, especially given he never acted like a candidate who wanted to win, but just wanted to pretend like he was running, talking about winning so much that we'll get tired of winning. So his entire candidacy was one big hype-fest of empty nonsense, sprinkled with convenient scapegoating of groups of people that he didn't care if he offended.

Si from the city-voter position, we'll all predict it was impossible to get more than 20-25% of the vote. And the only reason we knew otherwise is because of fact-based or poll-based surveys that said his voter base was growing among people we didn't know or talk to.

So like just because the New York Yankees are predicted to 90% to win the world series in a given year doesn't mean they're going to win. And even 538's predictions for Clinton were toggling between 50-90% chance of winning, and the voting margins were all around 1-6% national vote victory for Clinton, and she never exceeded 50% of the vote, and what do you know, she won the national vote with a 2.1% margin, 48.0% total. So anyone with a brain could have said "Voter turnout will determine this election and new voters on any side can tip it."

And anyone who says Clinton was sure she was going to win is ignorant. She wouldn't have cared so much about FBI Director James Comey announcements of imaginary emails no one has read that may contain incriminating information against Clinton. Like WTF? But if Clinton had a margin, she wouldn't have to care.

But really we can say the Media did exactly what it should do - it said Clinton would probably win, and it was close and every vote matters, at least in swing states, and people who cared voted, and people who didn't care didn't vote. And that's how it should be.

But I see another media bubble right now, the bubble that says Trump's regulation cuts and tax cuts is going to magically goose the market that has so far only been goosed for 8 years on cheap debt.

How should we deal with this media bubble? And worse, bull and bear markets are all built upon public sentiment, so its all self-reinforcing nonreality that looks like reality. So if people believe markets will go up, everyone will invest, and borrow more, and spend more, knowing the future will be bigger than the past. But the day a critical mass of people doubt that story and stop spending, and pull their money out of harm's way, the "facts" seem to change while all the fundamentals are the same.

So I imagine Trump's presidency stands on a similar precipice. People were suffering so they signed their name to a contract with a scoundrel who promises everyone will own their own moon in the night sky. And since we know this is impossible, we can say we're not deceived, and it was just truthful hyperbole offered by a person with no idea how to do anything except spend other people's money on spectacle. Its like we're all lemmings.

And so were do facts in journalism fit within all that?

The real outrage isn't that Clinton lost the election. It is that so many people purposely voted for a buffoon over a competent candidate. I don't even know what Clinton was supposed to do that she didn't do. I do agree it would be good if she just accepted "damn fools" and "I'm glad I'm finally off that crazy-making."

I do recall Bill Clinton thanking W for the tax cuts, and I imagine Hillary will be glad too that she can also get rich on Trump's tax cuts, as long as it lasts.

Ares said Hillary was a competent candidate. However, that's not how the election turned out. He also said that "so many people purposely voted for a buffoon" that she lost. I believe they voted both for him and against Hillary. Buffoonery is in the eye of the beholder. We shall see how he does.

Just when I think you are starting to think you prove me wrong. Trump's approach is much more aware of the possibilities and how we might utilize those possibilities. http://ijr.com/2017/03/822619-i-had-dinner-with-the-afghanistan-ambassador-what-he-said-about-the-differences-between-trump-obama-is-stunning/?utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebookWhere Obama did not want to lose Trump wants to win.That reliance on TDS will constantly have you not understanding why you are wrong. Though when I read the word buffoon I thought maybe you had run for an elective office, but alas "transference" was extent.